Weekend Leadership Reading: 4/26/19

Weekends are time when things slow down a little. Your weekend shouldn’t be two more regular work days. That’s a sure road to burnout. Take time to refresh yourself. Take time for something different. Take time for some of that reading you can’t find time for during the week.

Here are choice articles on hot leadership topics culled from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms. This week there are articles about rethinking cherished beliefs and persuasive myths.

“The most destructive myth about creativity is that there are innate traits that allow some people to be creative, while others, who lack these, cannot. The truth is that in decades of research on creativity, nobody has been able to identify any such traits.”

“Myths present a different, subtler trap, which is what makes even smart people fall for them. They are usually based on a plausible half-truth, and they do not immediately lead you astray if you start to act on them. It’s only with the passage of time that you realize that you’ve made a mistake, but by then your wrong choices can’t be unmade and the damage is done.”

“Imagine if you were suddenly in charge of rebuilding America’s infrastructure. Or overhauling our society’s healthcare. Or restructuring the tuition economics of higher education. How would you answer such a call? Twenty years ago, you might have led the effort as a problem-solver-in-chief, creating a plan by breaking the big challenge into smaller pieces, hiring analysts to crunch some options, and then forging a compromise solution among competing stakeholders. OK for then, but not today.”

“Let’s face it — we’re uncritical consumers of information. We accept that the news in our Facebook feed is accurate. We believe that Gwyneth Paltrow offers dependable health care insights. So, it’s no surprise that we embrace reasonable-sounding ideas about how to improve our work performance, especially if they’re advanced by people with Ph.D. after their names.”